Peaceable Kingdom

by Francine Prose

  Toby swam way out, though never out of sight. Linda lay down, but each time she closed her eyes, she pictured watery, blossoming flowers of blood, like in Jaws. When she saw Toby heading back, she took off her jeans and shirt and, as he emerged from the water, ran and hugged him. The drops of cold salt water felt wonderful on her skin.

  The next day was cloudy and cool. Linda and Toby walked into town. The town was one narrow street which got more crowded with shops selling straw bags and Kahlua as it neared the zócalo. They passed several restaurants at which Linda would have liked to stop, but Toby crossed the zócalo and kept walking till the street got less fancy again. He led her into a place with no front wall and a damp, outhouse smell. The girl who waited on them was so young the child on her hip could only have been her brother. Toby ordered two coffees and many things they didn’t have until the girl nodded yes.

  “Huevos rancheros,” Toby told Linda. “These places are where you get the really fresh tortillas.”

  After breakfast, they headed toward the far end of the island, where a French couple they’d met the night before had said they could find Mayan ruins. The French tourists were skinny and pale—not entirely well-looking. It turned out they had been traveling for eight years and had been to many of the same places as Toby. During an animated conversation about hepatitis, Linda had gone off to bed.

  Linda and Toby overshot the ruins by half a mile till they realized that the pile of stones they’d passed could once have been a lighthouse to guide the Mayan ships.

  “We should have gone to Chichén Itzá,” Toby said. “Maybe we still should. A real ruin would do you good. The thing about ruins is, you stand there thinking those people were actually here, you feel it, and then you think how all those civilizations have come and gone, so many people have died, that’s just the way it is, and it isn’t only you. I mean, isn’t only Greg. Should we go on to Chichén Itzá?”

  Linda hadn’t been thinking of Greg right then—ever since they’d left New York she’d been trying very hard not to—and now she was a bit startled. She said, “This is fine. Really, Toby. This is perfect.” Toby looked at her scornfully. There had been many times when Greg looked at her like that. Remembering this surprised her. She’d imagined that after someone died you’d forget the nastiness and just recall the love, but with Greg she remembered the nastiness, too.

  A grassy path led away from the water and along a lagoon. After a long time they stopped for a Sprite and tortillas. Toby showed Linda how to eat tortillas rolled up with white sugar, and a man told them about a bus that would take them near Señor Ramón’s.

  As soon as they got back, Toby lay down and took a nap. Linda read the guidebook, three pages on the island—mostly descriptions of hotels and restaurants where she now knew she would never eat. She thought, disloyally, that for someone who spent his life in the imports section, Toby showed no interest in tracking down the local mariachis. Perhaps he was worried that music might cost money. She’d never really seen it before, this streak of stinginess in Toby. He’d told her how, in the old days, you could keep traveling as long as you could make your money last. But this clearly wasn’t the case—no matter how much money was left, they had to be back Monday. That this should seem comforting made Linda unhappy, and she lay there watching a lizard appear and vanish through a hairline crack in the wall.

  Around five, they got up and dressed with vague plans of wandering into town. But as soon as they stepped outside, Señor Ramón came over and asked if they cared for a drink. It was clearly a social invitation, but Linda worried that Toby might misunderstand and ask the Señor how much.

  Toby said, “Thank you, we would.”

  Señor Ramón came back with a tray, three glasses, ice, a bottle of tequila and a bottle of Coke. He mixed drinks—tequila and Coke on ice—and gave them to Linda and Toby. “Mexico Libres,” he said. “My invention.”

  The drink was strong and sweet, and as Linda finished the first and took another, she felt very focused and at the same time very blurred. For once it didn’t worry her that she wasn’t contributing to the conversation; she liked the low rumbling voices of Toby and Señor Ramón. Toby was saying that they had found the ruins on the beach.

  “Oh, las ruinas.” Señor Ramón laughed. He said these ruins were nothing; he used to work as a tour guide at Chichén Itzá.

  “What a great job that must have been,” Toby said. “I’ve been to Chichén Itzá.”

  Señor Ramón said, “Great? I have a doctorate in Mayan languages and archaeology, and I worked as a tour guide and now I am managing a hotel. This is a shitty country.”

  Linda and Toby nodded vigorously. How odd, Linda thought, to be so quick to condemn a place they were paying money to vacation in. Toby said, “What about the U.S.? With a degree like that, you could teach…”

  “The U.S.,” said Señor Ramón, “is a shitty country, too.”

  “It’s a shitty world,” Toby said, and the three of them clinked glasses.

  All evening, the talk kept circling back to Chichén Itzá, and maybe it was the tequila, but several times, as Señor Ramón described the ruins, Linda wanted to go there, to just get on a bus and go. When she awoke the next morning, she was still thinking of it. But before she could speak, Toby put his arm around her and, settling her head on his chest, said, “Honey, I am hung over. This man needs a day at the beach.”

  Linda recalled how, when they’d planned this trip, it was all about what she needed, the next-best thing after Machu Picchu to help her get over Greg. She, too, felt a little queasy; last night seemed hard to recall. One thing was clear: Señor Ramón had told them it was simple to get to Chichén Itzá—a pleasant ferry trip and an easy bus connection in Valladolid.

  “I don’t know,” Toby said. “I mean, there are ruins and there are ruins. You can spend the day tripping around Chichén Itzá, taking in the beautiful pyramids and the ball court. And then you get to the cenote they threw all the Mayan virgins down, and you look down into the deep black sacrificial well, and it hits you that the entire place was basically about that. It is not for nothing that this whole culture is about panthers and human skulls. Sweetheart, that is not what you need.”

  Linda couldn’t quite put this together with what Toby was saying last night to Señor Ramón, or with what he always said about ruins, that the point of them wasn’t that something good had happened there, but that people had lived and died there.

  “What about Machu Picchu?” she said. “No one got sacrificed there?”

  “Those are two totally different stories,” Toby said. “For one thing, getting thrown into a well is totally different from getting pitched off the side of a mountain.”

  In the market, they bought sweet rolls, mangoes, tiny bananas, a hunk of white cheese, and a string bag to carry the food in. Near the ferry dock, Toby rented goggles and a snorkel. He asked Linda if they should rent some for her. She said if she wanted them she would go back. Then they set off for the beach.

  As Toby stripped down to his swimsuit, Linda said she wanted to get really baked before she went into the water. Toby swam off, and she lay down. For some time, her mind drifted pleasantly. But gradually, as the sun heated up, Linda began to sweat. She walked to the water’s edge, waded in to her knees, and ran back to dry land.

  It began to get very hot. Linda sat up and looked for shade. There had been a time—summers at Yankee Lake, and later, after her father died, Jones Beach with her mother and Greg—when she was always brown. But she had been pale for years, and now she was going to fry. The sensible thing would be to go back to the Hacienda. Would Toby know where to find her? Would he know that she hadn’t drowned?

  She rolled over onto her stomach and let the sun beat down on her till the inside of her skull felt strongly radioactive. Her mind drifted, first to one thing, then another, then to a particular night—this was when Greg had just gotten sick and moved back in with their mother. His friends visited constantly, so whenever Linda went to her mo
ther’s house, it was like time travel back to high school: once more the kitchen table completely surrounded by guys. That night, Greg kept trying to talk about life after death. Their mother kept changing the subject. Greg’s friends kept changing it back.

  Everyone seemed to have read the same descriptions of the afterlife, reports from people who’d been to the other side and returned to tell the tale. Casually, as if it were a neutral subject, and yet with a special fervor, because it was Greg who had brought it up, who let them offer—no, promise—him comfort, Greg’s friends spoke of tunnels leading toward light, paths lined on both sides with radiance. Inside the tunnels echoed God’s voice, and all along the light-filled path, your dead, your lost, beloved family and friends welcomed you, smiling.

  Greg said he refused to think of the afterlife as This Is Your Life with a fog machine and klieg lights. He said he preferred to think of it as eternal Fire Island.

  By late afternoon Linda looked boiled. Toby said, “Five seconds more on that beach we’d be talking emergency room.” Linda took a cold shower and two aspirins and the swig of paregoric Toby suggested. She was able to dress and go out to eat, though not to taste her food or listen as Toby told her what he’d seen skin diving. All that got through was his description of an octopus hiding its face behind a shell held in its tentacles.

  It was Toby’s idea to bring home a Coke: if Linda needed more aspirin during the night she’d have something to take it with. Around four, she got up and took two aspirin and then stayed awake drinking Coke. She slept some, and was glad to find it was morning—though she realized that the aspirin must have worn off. Her skin was completely on fire. She took another couple of aspirins but they didn’t seem to work. Waiting for Toby to wake just made her sunburn hurt worse. She put on her loosest shirt and shorts and went out into the yard.

  The light was already glaring, and the sky looked bleached; she must have slept later than she thought. She was surprised to see Señor Ramón at his table beneath the ramada. He looked up from his book and smiled and toasted her with his coffee cup. There was no way not to go over. She refused coffee, but when he said, “Coca-Cola?” she nodded and sat down.

  “What are you reading?” she said.

  “Rilke,” said Señor Ramón. “En español. It is my life ambition to translate Rilke into Mayan.” Then he peered at Linda. “You are this sunburned all over?” When she nodded, he made a clicking sound against his teeth.

  “I am sorry,” he said, in such a stricken tone that Linda said, “Well, it isn’t your fault.”

  “Oh, but it is,” said Señor Ramón. “I should have realized. It happens all the time. You cannot imagine how often Americans come down on vacation, they have been cold for so long, they get into the sun…then…just like you. You would think I would know to warn these girls, but that is the selfishness of the human mind, we cannot imagine that someone is truly different from us. Because here, of course, we’re dark. Sunburn is not our problem.”

  “You can’t think of everything,” Linda said. “You’ve got enough on your mind.”

  “Ah,” said Señor Ramón. “But this is my country and my hotel. I am a serious host. That is how I am. I cannot stand to see suffering. It is why life is so hard for me. Mostly I am troubled by the sufferings of our poor, and of our educated unemployed young people, but at Chichén Itzá I was unhappy even when one of my elderly tourists would be overcome by heat and have to wait on the bus and miss the pyramids—”

  “That’s really nice of you,” Linda said.

  “Nice,” said Señor Ramón. There was such a long silence that Linda became uneasy. Finally Señor Ramón smiled a sad, distracted smile and said, “The Mayans had doctors greater than your Houston surgeons. They had uses for more than ten thousand jungle plants. Perhaps in the market…or maybe I have some here…”

  “Excuse me?” said Linda, but Señor Ramón didn’t answer. He went into the house and, after a minute, returned with an unlabeled blue bottle.

  “For sunburn,” he said. “The reason I have it is, so many of my guests, so many Americans, come here and just like you…”

  “God,” Linda said. “Thanks. I can’t believe how sweet that is.”

  “Did you meet Vivian?” he said, and when Linda looked blank, he said, “Of course. Vivian left just before you arrived. Vivian was Canadian, very fair, she got sunburned, worse than you, and I gave her some of this and the next day she was back at the beach…” Señor Ramón reached for Linda’s hand. “Come,” he said, “I will put it on for you.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Linda that Señor Ramón meant anything but to give her the bottle. She said, “Please. Don’t bother.” Her voice sounded thin, incapable of the mildest resistance as Señor Ramón took her arm.

  The last thing Linda wanted was for Señor Ramón to rub Mayan suntan cure on her. And yet he seemed so sure, as if this were the most ordinary occurrence, a professional matter, something a hotel manager did every day. He made refusing seem childish and absurd, like refusing to open your mouth in the dentist’s chair. He made refusing seem unspeakably rude, a paranoid, racist, mean-spirited act that would wound him, make him think she was hesitating because she was American and he was Mexican, because she didn’t trust him. Refusing would mark her as the suspicious one, the dirty-minded one, the coward.

  The path of least resistance was to let him guide her inside. Linda went slightly numb, like she did before medical checkups, and she told herself that there were health spas all over the world where women paid thousands for skin treatments by much stranger people than Señor Ramón.

  The inside of Señor Ramón’s house was so dim it took her some time to make out two rooms: a main room with a chair, a table, a hot plate, and farther on, a room with a bed. Señor Ramón sat down on the chair. “Take your clothes off,” he said.

  “It’s okay, I don’t need to,” said Linda. “My arms and legs are the worst part. The rest really isn’t that bad.”

  “You were wearing a bathing suit?” said Señor Ramón. “No? Please, don’t be embarrassed. I am not looking. Don’t be silly. Otherwise, we will get medicine on your clothes.”

  Once more Linda hesitated, and once more the tone of Señor Ramón’s voice made it perfectly clear that this was all business, all health, that there was nothing sexual about it. Anything like that would be strictly in Linda’s mind.

  Linda took off her clothes and stood naked in front of Señor Ramón. Señor Ramón tipped the bottle and filled his palm with thick pink liquid that looked suspiciously like Pepto-Bismol. He rubbed it into her arms and then into her legs.

  Linda held her breath, waiting to see how he touched her. But there was nothing sexual, nothing even remotely suggestive in his soothing but slightly impersonal touch. There was one moment, one moment, as he worked his way toward the sharp demarcations left by her bathing suit—he hesitated, then stopped. It was a mere split second, but it scared her, it gave her the chills. Then Señor Ramón lifted his hand and, with swift light strokes of his fingers, rubbed gingerly and even a little angrily away from her bathing-suit lines.

  Linda stood very still and thought of a morning she’d walked into Greg’s hospital room and found her mother rubbing lotion on him, for his lesions. Linda had stopped in the doorway, hearing a voice in her brain chant: Forget this, forget. But of course she hadn’t forgotten, and she realized now that she wouldn’t forget, that this memory had trailed her to Mexico, to this dim room where she stood naked before a stranger who would never know Greg, or what any of them had been through.

  Señor Ramón said, “You have had a death in your family.”

  Linda didn’t ask how he knew. He would say Toby told him. He would say he could tell from her skin tone. What difference did it make? It occurred to her that this was the sleaziest thing she had ever heard, asking about Greg’s death while rubbing Pepto-Bismol into her naked flesh. And yet she was so relieved that he knew, and that she no longer had to pretend to be a normal person on vacation. It f
elt luxurious and almost sinful to throw herself on Señor Ramón’s sympathy, on their common humanity, on the losses that happen to all of us, regardless of country or race.

  “Yes,” she said. “My brother.”

  Señor Ramón said, “You Americans. You know, many times when I studied in your country, people—and I am talking here about graduate students, professors, the so-called intelligentsia—these people would ask me, ‘Tell us the truth now. Why is your Mexican culture so morbid? So obsessed with death? All those skulls and snakes and skeletons and…’ And I would think, You lucky people—you live in a country where no one ever dies.”

  Linda just looked at him. And after a while Señor Ramón said, “I am very sorry. I must remember that you are not Uncle Sam.” Then he suggested that she put her clothes back on. He told her that her sunburn would feel better in a few hours and asked if she didn’t feel better already.

  “Yes,” Linda said, “I do.” And in fact it was blissfully painless to put on her clothes and walk out.

  But when she got back to her room, she felt worse. The sight of Toby sleeping, curled up, the grayish sheets, clothes strewn everywhere—everything shamed her now, and she understood that she had been a fool, standing there naked, letting a stranger touch anywhere he pleased. She felt a flush, then a tingling all over, a prickling that so terrified her that it was a great relief to remember that she was sunburned. After a while the tingling turned to pain, and she sat down and waited for Toby.

  She imagined telling Toby what had happened. Toby would laugh, especially when he figured out that nothing really serious had occurred. He would tease her and make Pepto-Bismol jokes, and now whenever they saw Señor Ramón, they would make Pepto-Bismol jokes behind his back. Laughter would make her feel better, would prove to her that none of this was important.

  She was glad she had Toby and could tell him this, that he wouldn’t get angry or jealous, like another guy might. She could tell Toby anything. Or almost anything. She wouldn’t know how to explain that she’d told Señor Ramón about Greg. Nor could she tell Toby of how she had been reminded of her mother in Greg’s hospital room. She hadn’t told Toby about that at the time. He didn’t want to hear. He had made it very clear to her that he didn’t want to hear. There is no one I can tell this to, Linda thought, and for a moment she felt quite breathless.